Run Away Slowly
by boschette
Summary: I love Joey and Pacey as much as the next person, but without conflict there is no fanfiction, right? So here’s a conflict story based on the rocky relationship of two people that I’m close to. Please R&R!
1. Default Chapter

Matt dropped me off in front of the loft, and I wondered briefly if I should invite him up. I even hesitated for a few seconds, and I think he felt the awkwardness as I ticked off the reasons not to and weighed them against the reasons I probably should. He bailed me out by saying, "I should be getting home. Early day tomorrow."

I was relieved. I smiled at him. "Thanks for letting me tag along with you tonight, Matt. I didn't want to show up solo."

"Yeah, those editors sure can throw a party. When tight asses cut loose, it's bound to be a good time."

I laughed easily. "I just can't believe some of the people I got to meet tonight. I mean, Garrett McConnell! And Jan Haverton, and Michael Barrett...wow. It's just... thanks for taking me with you."

"It's never too early in your career to start networking, Jo," he said. "I'm happy to help groom a rising star in the publishing biz. Besides, I could have done worse in the date department. Don't think it went unnoticed that I showed up with the most beautiful woman there."

I smiled and tucked my hair behind my ear, embarrassed by the compliment and grateful for the dimness inside the car so he couldn't see the blush that heated my face.

And then without warning, he leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. I was taken completely off guard by the gesture, and my blush deepened, probably enough to be visible even in the shadows. As he straightened up behind the wheel, he cleared his throat, and I thought that maybe he had even surprised himself. "Well..." he said. "I'll see you Monday?"

"Oh, yeah, sure. Good night, Matt." I got out and refrained from watching his car pull away from the curb. Instead, I fumbled for my key and entered the building. When I opened the door to the loft I shared with Pacey, it was pitch-black. And he was supposed to be at work. That's why I screamed when a voice spoke to me out of the darkness.

"How was it?"

I flicked the light switch by the door, my hand pressed to my heart, which had practically jumped out of my body at the shock. He was sitting on the kitchen counter drinking a beer. His eyes were direct, without a trace of the characteristic sparkle that was so much a part of him. Of what I loved about him.

"God, Pacey, you scared the hell out of me," I said. "I thought you had to close at the restaurant tonight." It occurred to me in some vague way that my rapid heartbeat might be the result of more than just the human-nature startle of having a voice speak to you when you thought you were alone. I brushed aside the not-quite-tangible thought enough to register that Pacey wasn't returning my smile.

I turned and hung my coat on the rack beside the door. My hand was shaking. Not that I had anything to be nervous about, but still ... things could be misinterpreted. And these days, with Pacey, they often were.

"I switched shifts with Carter so I could get off early. I was going to surprise you, take you to that dinner party. Where've you been?" The absolute lack of curiosity in that question made it perfectly clear that he already knew the answer, or at least had very strong suspicions. I made a conscious effort to make my hands be still.

"I've _been_ at that dinner party," I said, trying to keep my tone light and casual but failing to sound completely like myself. I could see the fight coming, you see, and I hated that. I hated fighting with him. I especially hated fighting with him over this.

"You went with him." Again, not a question.

Fleetingly, I thought of lying to him. It would have been easy to say "No; what are you talking about?" or even "Who?" or "Don't be ridiculous." There might still be a way to bail out of this old fight before it got started again. I didn't lie, though. Lying would be like admitting that I had done something wrong. And I hadn't. I _hadn't._

"Yes." My eyes held his firmly, refusing to look away even though his stare was hard and cold and unrelenting. It's strange how the same eyes that can make you melt with the warmth and power of the love they convey in a single look can also make you feel like sinking through the floor. That's what I wanted to do now ... sink through the floor and be done with this scene. But it was too late for that. I knew it was. It was all over his face.

When he didn't respond, I decided to go on, realizing even as I spoke that I sounded defensive. Defensiveness can indicate guilt. Not that I had anything to feel guilty about, mind you, but it might sound suspect to an unbiased third party.

"I had to go to this party, Pacey, it's very important to develop connections with the higher-ups if I'm ever going to get anywhere in this company. Matt just offered to be my escort. Just so I didn't have to go alone."

Still he stared at me with those eyes I loved so much. Those eyes that usually held all the tenderness and sweet good nature I could ever have hoped to see in the man I'd chosen to spend the rest of my life with. Now, though, I almost couldn't see Pacey in them at all.

I went to him, placed my still-unsteady hands on his knees. "I wish you'd told me you were going to change shifts, Pace," I said. "It was very sweet of you to do that."

"How was your date?" he asked, and I cringed. He was drunk, I could see that now. Drunk and hurt. And for some reason I couldn't begin to figure out, that made me angry.

"For God's sake, Pacey, it wasn't a date," I snapped. "Don't do this."

"What? I'm supposed to be okay with you going to some fancy dinner party with a man whose main goal in life seems to be getting into my fiancée's pants? Is that what you're saying? I'm supposed to just say, 'oh, great, Joey, I'm glad you had a good time. Maybe next time you'll get lucky'?"

"Dammit, Pacey!" I slapped my hand down on the counter next to him in frustration.

"Well, come on, Jo, are you telling me that's not true? The man has made more moves on you than Dawson Leery ever got credit for, and you want me to just stand here and tell you I'm fine with you going out with him? To hell with that, Joey, I'm NOT fine with it."

I put my hands over my eyes briefly. A headache had sprung up in my temples. "How many times are we going to have this fight? Why can't you just trust me?" And I regretted the words before they even left my mouth.

He jumped down from the counter and stood in front of me, staring me down. "Do you want me to recap it for you?" he asked coldly. "I think you know why."

He went into the bedroom and slammed the door so hard the walls shook. I stood there silently for a few moments, my head and my heart both aching with the knowledge that he was right. And the old familiar thoughts began to seep in: I didn't deserve him. Here I was with the best, most loving, most devoted man in the world, sharing his bed and his heart and his soul, and every day we were together was one day closer to the time when I would destroy it.


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N: I didn't want to do this to them, I promise. I adore Pacey and Joey. It just sort of came out this way when I started writing, and like I said, it's loosely based on two people I know. I'm sorry to be such a downer, but please review and give me hell if you have to. Thanks in advance!**

What's happening to us, this slow, painful dissolution, is my fault, and you're going to hate me when I finish telling you about it. Knowing my guilt, admitting it to myself and to him and being helpless to fix it, to put things right, is only making the impossible harder. I'm losing him. Slowly, surely, unalterably.

I keep having this nightmare, the same damn one, every other night or so. And the awful part is that I can never remember it clearly when I wake up. All I'm ever able to cling to in the thin threshold that exists between sleep and reality is darkness and fear and an overshadowing shame that makes me want to cry even after I open my eyes. I always have to reach over and touch him then, in the aftershock of this dream, to reassure myself that he is there, and that he is Pacey.

Sometimes he stirs in his sleep, shifting slightly against my touch. In the wretched loneliness of the early morning dark, nursing the remnants of the nightmare, I often wonder if he means to pull away from me.

_"Do you want me to recap it for you? I think you know,"_ he had said, and the bitter edge in his voice couldn't really cover up the hurt beneath it.

I'd rather him be angry. Yell. Punch walls. Hell, punch _me._ But of course he would never put his hands on me in anger, not my Pacey.

It's a testament to how far we've slipped in the last few months that something like Pacey hitting me is preferable to this. At least then we could share some of the burden. As it stands now, the guilt is all mine. Don't think I don't realize how selfish that sounds, to want him to feel some of it too. Believe me, I know.

When did I become this person? I look in the mirror and don't recognize the woman staring back at me. I think Little Joey Potter would hate her. I know I do.

How do you even begin to apologize for making someone's worst fears come true? To atone for something like that? I'm still trying to work that one out. Every time I close my eyes, I see his as they were that day; flat pools of some liquid colder than ice, blazing at us from the doorway of my office. Harsh fluorescent lights, a stapler pressing into the small of my back, a near-stranger's hand on my thigh. One thought engulfed me, engulfed everything: We had shattered him. That thought was the whole world.

I know now it wasn't even true. Not the "we" part, anyway.

_You did this, Joey. No one else. You shattered him. And all because he loves you too much. _

There's no excuse for what I did. I'd love to tell you there is. I'd love to gather the tatters of sanctimony and tell you that Pacey Witter was the farthest thing from my mind that night, that I didn't even know what I was doing. That Matt had put me under some kind of black-magic spell and made me helpless to control my actions. I wish I could say that when Pacey opened the door and saw me cradled in another man's embrace, leaning against a desk littered with manuscripts and papers as if it were just another workday, I jolted out of the spell and saved both of us from the agony of the minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months that followed.

But it didn't happen that way. There was no spell. It was just me, shattering him in the instant it took his brain to acknowledge what his eyes were seeing.

Behind my eyelids I can still see the roses (roses, God help me!) dropping out of his slack hand, his jaw clenching and unclenching as he tried simultaneously to understand and to deny the scene before him. It's all in slow motion in my memory, like some ridiculously melodramatic scene in a daytime drama. I never watch that crap. It's so unrealistic. Not like this, which is so realistic it makes me want to throw up.

I don't remember screaming, but I think I did. When he yanked Matt away from me and drew back and punched him in the mouth, when Matt's blood flew and spattered my wrinkled white blouse, I'm pretty sure I screamed.

I don't remember the tears starting to flow, either, but I know they did. I reached for his arm, begging him—for what, God only knows—and he threw my hand off with such force that I stumbled back against the desk. I had a bruise on my hip the next day from that, and I remember wishing it would stay there as a permanent reminder of how abysmal it feels to shatter someone you love.

"Pacey, please?!" Sobbing. I still don't know what I was asking him for.

I would have traded every happy moment of my entire life just to be spared the look he gave me. I can't even do it justice with words. In it, I saw the end of all the goodness life has to offer. It will never leave me, that look.

He was shattered. And when I gathered myself together enough to apply some screwed-up kind of logic to what had happened, the reasons obediently lined up in front of me, glaringly naked and oh, so trivial: Because I worked late that night with a man who seemed so eager to help me jumpstart my career. Because we got tipsy on the bourbon that he kept, for some reason I don't even care to know, in his desk drawer. Because he read my poems and told me I had the soul of a writer. Because it was dark and cold outside and I didn't want to go home just yet.

Because I had found the ring box in Pacey's coat pocket just that morning. In that little velvet box lay all the fears I'd ever harbored about commitment and the implications of forever. It ignited my self-destructive need to run.

You're probably wondering why he didn't leave me that night and never look back. Believe me, I've asked myself the same thing every day since. And I don't have an answer, except that sometimes love is stronger than it should be.

I've doubted many things in my life. I've never doubted his love for me.


	3. Chapter 3

**Thanks for the reviews! I know it's depressing, but I can't stop. I guess I'm angsty these days; you know how it goes. Please keep reading, and let me know what you think.**

Blood pounded sickly in my temples. The anger, so familiar now and so overwhelming in its very existence, boiled inside of me, making my stomach clench uncomfortably as I stood rigidly at the window and stared out at the meaningless lights of a city I would never call home. She was probably still standing where I'd left her, wearing that simple black dress that made her look so beautiful I couldn't stand it, afraid to follow me into the bedroom. And that was good; it was better that way. I was afraid, too. Afraid of what I might say to her just now. Of what she might say. Of looking into her face and seeing any trace of what I'd seen there the night I went to her office to surprise her with roses and a promise and found ... what I'd found.

If I saw guilt in her eyes tonight, I might have to accept the truth I've spent the last seven months holding off with every fiber of my being. The truth about Joey Potter and Pacey Witter, and how they're destined to tear each other apart.

Joey Potter. My God, was there ever a time when this woman didn't have a hold over me? When I try really hard, I seem to remember a point in my life, a million years ago, when she was little more to me than a symbol of life on the creek, of the life I was supposed to lead. Of the life my father had led, and my brother. Just another smart-ass, middle-class underachiever who would live and die in Capeside because that's all he knew. Bound to settle—always, on everything—because he was too blind to believe he deserved more. Too blind—or too smart.

What died the night I opened her office door and found her in the process of undoing us wasn't my love for her. Hell no. That would have been easier, of course. If I had a choice, I would have turned my back, ignored her pleading and her tears and her empty cries for forgiveness, and caught the first train home to Capeside to live my life as I'd always expected to live it. Simply. Honestly. Maybe boringly. But the way it should've been.

I didn't have a choice, though. I never have, where she's concerned. She is my blessing and my curse. I gave in to her with his blood drying on my knuckles. I wish I could say I didn't cry.

She caught my hand in the middle of the street and I swung around to yell at her, and her wet, shiny, lost eyes drilled into me, straight into my heart. If I'd had a chance in hell of walking away, which I don't believe I did, it died the moment she pierced me with those eyes. She seemed so ... shattered. She cried and clutched my hand in a death grip and begged me not to leave her.

_"You're everything to me, Pacey, you're everything, please believe that. Please, baby ... please don't walk away from me. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."_

Believe it or not, I actually had to fight the urge to pull her into my arms then. Even though her white shirt had come untucked and there was lipstick smeared around her mouth, even with those signs of betrayal staring me in the face, my base instinct was to comfort her. Isn't that screwed up? _I_ wanted to comfort _her_. If you've ever been in love you might understand. If you've ever pinned your dreams and your heart and your soul to another person, put yourself at the mercy of their whims, and seen yourself every time you looked into their eyes, you probably do. If you don't, you never will. I resisted holding her, but it wasn't easy.

We walked all the way home even though it was so cold I couldn't feel my fingers and the tears were practically frozen on my cheeks. We would have walked home if we were in Capeside, and I refused to cater to the ways of this city at this particular moment in time. It would have seemed disloyal, somehow.

She stayed several paces back the whole way, lagging behind me like a bad child. It was the way she'd been with Dawson all those ages ago, desperate for his approval, his blessing, so childishly afraid of his anger that she'd been willing to cast aside her own desires to accommodate his. I might have hated her for that, if I had the option. I didn't.

That night had been seven months ago. We'd gotten through it, but not past it. I'd forgiven her because I had to. When, six weeks later, I'd finally recovered enough to ask the question I'd been so naively and romantically anticipating that night, she had accepted in spite of the fears I knew she still harbored. And there was happiness; of course there was. We were in love, we were happy. I forgave her ... but I didn't forget.

Apparently she did. If she could think it was okay to accompany that asshole to a party she'd wanted me to take her to, if she thought nothing of wearing that dress I'd given her and looking so damn beautiful for the man who had almost spelled the end of us, then obviously the night in question wasn't as indelibly etched into her brain as it is mine. Obviously it hadn't been the wake-up call that it was for me.

Now, I stepped away from the window, draining the last of my beer. I decided I needed another one. When I opened the bedroom door, she jumped a little and looked at me with wide eyes. She wasn't crying. She was sitting on the barstool at the kitchen counter with a glass of wine before her. I walked past her to the refrigerator, smelling her perfume (she'd worn perfume for him, I thought bitterly), and I could feel her eyes on my back as I bent down for a fresh bottle.

"Pacey," she said in a near-whisper, her voice hoarse and timid.

I straightened up and looked at her blandly, waiting for her to go on. Apparently she had spoken before she knew what she was going to say, because her eyes drifted back to her wineglass and she traced the rim with her index finger.

Several moments passed, filled with things we didn't say. I mentally tried and rejected several attempts to put into words the nagging questions that were all tangled up in my head. _"Are you sleeping with him?" "Why are you doing this to us?" "What's happening to you, Joey?" "Who are you?"_

Nothing seemed right. When the phone rang, she jumped again, but neither of us reached for it.

I leaned across the counter to peer at the caller ID window. "Barber, Matthew." The name glowed up at me in sick green letters like a slap in the face, and I looked at her with what probably came across as an expression of disgust. In fact, that's probably what it was. "You'd better get that, Jo," I said in a tone that was a horrible imitation of good cheer.

I took my coat off the rack by the door and walked out. I couldn't bear to stick around and see if she was going to pick the phone up.


	4. Chapter 4

The sound of the door slamming behind him knocked the breath right out of my lungs. It was a flat, hard crack, final and frightening. It put solid wood between us, filling the spot where a moment before his hurt, beautiful face had been. And why not? The door was no more solid than the wall we'd built against each other, the one we never spoke of but both recognized for what it was. The wall that was preventing us from reaching each other in spite of the ring I wore on my left hand, in spite of the forgivenesses we'd granted and the vows we'd planned to make.

I couldn't touch him when he was standing right in front of me any more than I could reach through that door and fling myself into his arms. The wall was too strong, too real. It was too late to bring him back with kisses, caresses, promises of forever; we'd drifted farther out than we'd ever meant to. We could barely see the shore where we'd begun, and only then when we squinted and strained our eyes.

_I think I'm in love with you._

You think, or you know?

I know.

I didn't pick up the phone. That's what you're wondering, isn't it? Well, I didn't. It would have been easy to do it. I even reached out and put my palm on the receiver, feeling the warm hard plastic against my skin and the faint vibration of electricity running through the instrument of betrayal. It would have been deceptively easy to pick it up, press a button, speak a few pleasantries to the man whose intentions I've managed to convince myself I once believed honorable. (I've never been naïve, you see, so deep down I know better.)

What stopped me was the sound of the slamming door that still echoed through the dark and drafty loft. A painting hung slightly askew on the wall over the couch. I looked at it for a long time as I waited for the ringing to stop. At last it did, mercifully, and I cringed against Pacey's voice as the answering machine kicked on. No message, thank God for small favors. I released the breath I didn't realize I'd been holding.

I drifted over to the window wall and looked out at the light-sprinkled night without much hope of seeing him—but needing to, all the same. And I did. He was standing almost directly below me, a shadow in a bulky winter coat, the frosty plumes of his breath stabbing the night air and making me shiver even in the comparable warmth of the apartment.

From this distance I could pretend all was painless and fresh between us again. He could have been on his way to the market on the corner to pick up a carton of ice cream. He always makes fun of me for getting ice cream cravings in the dead of winter. I tell him it's comforting to savor the essence of summertime on your tongue when it's so cold outside you can't walk ten steps without getting the shakes. Ice cream is summer, and summer is childhood, simplicity, lazy afternoons with friends who you're sure will never leave you...

The figure below buttoned up his coat and turned just enough for the moonlight to illuminate his face, and the fantasy snapped in half like a dry twig. For a moment my heart seemed to freeze up in my chest, because in that brief instant I wasn't sure the figure in the shadows below the window _was_ Pacey. My stomach lurched as if a captive passenger on a rapidly dropping elevator. But the feeling passed just as suddenly, and Pacey (yes, it was him, of course it was him, it had only been a trick of the light) started walking down the sidewalk and was swallowed up by the darkness.

The loft seemed too big and too empty when I finally turned away from the window and studied my surroundings. The crooked painting taunted me from its dizzying angle. I walked over to it, reached out to straighten it, and then took my hand away, leaving the painting hanging as it was. I wandered into the bedroom and began to undress, shedding the simple but elegant black gown and leaving it in a melancholy pile on the floor by the closet. Pacey had given me the dress last year, and it had come off just moments after I'd put it on to show him; we'd made love on the floor by the windows. The dress, crumpled up next to the closet, suddenly looked to me like betrayal in fabric form.

I put on an oversized tee-shirt of Pacey's, inhaling deeply as I pulled it over my head. His scent was all over it. Instead of easing my sadness, that fact seemed to make it hurt a bit more. I hugged the shirt to my body and climbed into his side of the bed.

It's funny how something as supposedly strong as one person's love for another can be so easily bruised—even crushed without too much difficulty. And the potential for pain is so immense, triggered by such trivialities as a late night at work, an error in judgement, a badly timed phone call. It makes me wonder for the millionth time if it's worth it. The sixteen-year-old I used to be would have said yes, yes, it's worth it. Cynical as she pretended to be, she was a romantic at heart. A message spray-painted on a rented wall and a lovingly restored sailboat called True Love were all she needed to satisfy any doubts she might have had about the worthwhile nature of following that unknown road. But that sixteen-year-old is gone, and I'm not sure she would really understand the gravity of this no-holds-barred earth-shattering love I currently find myself drowning in.

Even as I'm fighting to pry him out of my heart, I don't want to lose him. But the bitter truth remains: I'm going to drown. And I'll be damned if I'm going to take him down with me.

I turn on my side and press my face into his pillow, wishing he would climb in beside me and wrap his strong, comforting arms around me.

And praying that he wouldn't.


	5. Chapter 5

A proud man might deny standing on the wrong side of that door with his heart in his throat, waiting for her to follow, and with something as simple as a look, a touch, or a smile, allow him a chance to forgive her—to make him whole again. A proud man might have been halfway down the street before the phone even stopped ringing, in a cab before she had time to figure out the bottom line and get her coat on. A proud man might have been able to turn away from that woman, all silky hair and big, dark, shining eyes and porcelain skin, and finish saying the goodbye she didn't seem to be able to get through on her own.

A proud man never loved Joey Potter.

I don't know how long I stood there with my head against the brick wall by the service elevator, blood thumping in my ears in time to the rapid drumbeat of my pulse. It could have been half an hour, but I'll save some of my depleted dignity and say it wasn't that long. I was grateful for one thing: the soundproof walls. The slamming of the door had cut off the ringing phone and her subsequent actions; I had no way of knowing if she was on the other side of it right now, on the road to completing the betrayal she'd begun so many months ago.

The bitter wind hit me with the force of a 50-pound sandbag in the gut, and I paused below our big, bare window to button my coat against the cold. She might have been watching me, hovering above the dark sidewalk like a troubled angel, silhouetted in a warm golden glow with tears streaming down her cheeks and the fear of losing me in her eyes. I didn't turn around to look. I was afraid she might not be there.

So I walked. It was dark and cold, and my head was throbbing from too much beer and too much thinking, and my feet resisted every step I took away from home, but I kept going. I entertained myself with visions of a chance encounter with the bastard who was driving this wedge between us. My knuckles actually tingled in anticipation of slamming into his jaw, wiping off his smug, condescending smile once and for all, and paying him back in small part for the pain his existence had caused both of us. It was a big city, and odds were highly stacked against such a meeting, but I enjoyed the daydream just the same.

But the mind, in its fundamentally logical and often infuriating persistence, always returns to the real problem, doesn't it? And the real problem wasn't something I could satisfy myself by inflicting physical pain upon. The real problem wasn't him, as much as I hated the guy, as much as I would love to absolve Joey by putting all the responsibility on him. He wasn't the one who had done this to us. We were to blame, Joey and me.

I've known that all along, I think, that my desire for her, my need for her, was the one thing that would eventually be our undoing. It clashed in an insurmountable way with her terror of stability, her natural instinct that refused to let her be happy or satisfied or—God forbid—complacent. So the harder I fought to hang on to her, the harder she struggled. This counterproductive fight was breaking us, not just us as a couple, but individually, too. Sometimes I was almost certain that when it was all over and she had won (as the deepest part of me knew she would), I'd look in the mirror and realize that all that was left of Pacey J. Witter, lovable loser that he'd been, was pieces. And without her, all I knew for sure was that I wouldn't be able to put the pieces back together again. Without her I could never be whole again.

I walked until the wind wasn't stinging my face anymore because my face was numb. Periodically I raised a red, raw hand to wipe at my nose, which was protesting the frigid air. I wished vaguely that I'd brought my gloves. _"Hold that thought, Jo. Before you pick up the phone and drive that spear you're wielding through the pitiful muscle that is my heart, give me a second to grab my gloves so my fingers don't drop off from frostbite when I'm wandering the city trying to forget that I love you." _ I chuckled to myself and the woman walking a few paces in front of me turned around and gave me a strange look. I smiled at her, and she turned back around and picked up her speed a bit. Ah, New York. You gotta love it.

The first time we had walked this city together had been a magical experience. I remember having trouble tearing my gaze away from her face, her cheeks flushed with excitement, her eyes shining as she pointed out buildings and landmarks, filling me in on all the lovely minutiae she had soaked up in her brief residence here. And as she shared her city with me, I'd fallen in love with it because she was in love with it, and I was in love with her. It was just that simple.

"Jen gave me my first tour of New York," she had said, her smile fading and her tone losing its lilting quality as the rawness of the all-too-recent loss of our friend rolled in on us again like a merciless wave that wouldn't break on the shore. "She knew it so well, she knew it like the back of her hand." Her voice had broken, and tears welled up in those beautiful dark eyes. I had taken her face between my hands and made her look at me. I thought I was going to say something profound, soothing, at least moderately intelligent, something that would stop the tears before they started flowing. But instead I leaned in and kissed her, our lips parting in the warm, slow, delicate motion that was the wonder and rapture of the summer before senior year all over again. And when I pulled back and looked into her eyes again, the tears had frozen, and the glimmer of happiness had returned.

What I said didn't really qualify as enlightening or comforting or even especially relevant, but it made Joey smile, and at that moment that was the most important thing in the world to me. "We'll do Jen's city proud," I said.

My hands were stinging now, and there was a lead weight sitting on my chest cavity. It made it hard to breathe. It made it impossible to picture Joey's face without some degree of discomfort. So what could I do? Going home seemed the most appealing option, but my feet, which had been so reluctant to let me walk away from that building now seemed to have reconsidered and decided to refuse to let me go back, instead.

I didn't really think, just turned in to the first neon-blinding hole-in-the-wall I stumbled upon, went to the bar, and plopped myself down on a stool. Going home wasn't an option, at least not until I felt I could look at her and not see the end of us.

Maybe I would discover the cure for love or the remedy for heartache at the bottom of a shot glass.


	6. Chapter 6

Sleep is a sadist. That's the thought that finally drove me out of bed, still wearing his clothes and smelling his scent, still enveloped in darkness and slightly lightheaded. It wants to steal over you at the most inopportune moments, when you're on the road in the middle of a long car trip and there's nowhere to pull over, or when you're in a Monday morning staff meeting, taking notes on editorial lineups and fighting the weight of your eyelids. But when you seek it as a means of escape, when you reach for its suffocating unawareness for a moment's respite from the despair of your waking world, it refuses to be captured. Sleep is a sadist.

So I gave up on it and wandered back out to the living room. Too big, too empty.

"Where are you, Pace?" My voice in the silence startled me. It sounded weak, strange. Not really like my voice at all. And of course there was no answer. I would have known if he'd come in during the fifteen minutes or so that I'd been fruitlessly courting unconsciousness. Pacey was many things—quiet, as a rule, wasn't one of them.

I went over to the kitchen and started rummaging around in the cabinet for headache medicine, cursing myself for being so indulgent with the wine. God knew I'd never been able to hold my liquor. The overhead light glinted off the diamond on my left hand and I froze with the Advil bottle an inch away from my reaching fingers and stared at it, transfixed, as if I'd never seen it before.

_I love you, Pacey, you know that! God, you must know that! _

_Well I'm sorry if that's a little hard for me to process right now, Jo, seeing as how there's an image of you about to screw another man on top of your desk burned into my brain. No, don't! You don't want to touch me right now. Not now ... not—with those hands._

_What can I do? What can I say, Pace? Please, just tell me, and I'll do it, I'll say it! _

_Tell me why, Joey. Tell me why you would do something like this to me. To us. _

_I—I don't know! It wasn't—I didn't—_

_Bullshit._

_I don't know, Pacey! I'm just so scared, I'm so ... I'm so afraid of ..._

_Of what, Jo? Of me? Of us? Are we back to that amateur psychological scarred-from-the-past fear of commitment garbage? Because I thought we'd left that behind us a long time ago. I thought we'd gotten past it, I thought you had grown up a little. What the hell are you so scared of?_

_Of forever! Okay? That's what keeps me up at night, that's what makes me do these incredibly self-destructive things, that's what makes me wish I didn't love you so much! I know how crazy that sounds, but it's the truth! I can't even fathom the implications of forever..._

..._You knew. You knew I was going to ask. You did this on purpose, then. You did this because you wanted to destroy us. Didn't you?_

No! I snapped myself roughly out of the gripping clarity of this nightmarish memory and brought out the Advil bottle, slamming the cabinet door harder than was necessary. I swallowed four of the orange pills, gulping them down against the dry lump that had risen in my throat. One of the worst nights in a life peppered with bad nights, and I can recount it in achingly accurate detail, from the angry hurt in his bloodshot eyes to the feel of empty air as he snatched his arm out of my grasp when I went to touch him; the helpless panicky feeling that clutched at my chest and made me feel like a prisoner on a runaway train as I realized that if he was right about my motives, success might mean the ultimate loss.

But I hadn't lost him. Not that night. That night he had gone to bed alone and shattered, leaving me crying on the couch with my hands pressed to my makeup-streaked face. And when at last I crept into the bedroom and climbed in beside him, terrified of touching him and having him shrink away from me again, there were no words, even though I sensed that he was awake. At some point during the silent, wakeful early hours, I had found a strength desperate enough to make me seek out his hand underneath the covers. I twined my cold fingers through his warm, strong ones and held my breath. After what seemed like an eternity, I felt those slack fingers tighten almost imperceptibly around mine, and I could breathe again. A tear tracked slowly down my cheek and soaked into the pillow.

Now, leaning heavily against the kitchen counter and tasting the slightly sweet coating of the Advil at the back of my throat, I noticed that my stomach had tightened up into an uneasy knot—why was I rehashing things best left in the past? I had to think about the here and now, and in the here and now my biggest concern was Pacey. Why hadn't I gone after him? Why had I let him walk out that door already half-drunk and in no frame of mind to be wandering the streets at night?

Hateful thoughts tried to crowd into my mind, so chilling in their boldness that I actually shook my head to try to dismiss them. _Because you want him to finish what you started. Because you know it's only a matter of time now that you've gotten the first thread worked out, and the unraveling is picking up speed every time you have one of these fights. Because you're tired of waiting for it to end and you'd rather have it over so you can once again be the tragic victim of your own neuroses. _

If any of that is true, I deserve to lose him. Maybe I do anyway. Picking up the phone, I looked at the keypad and debated dialing his cell number. What harm could it do? If he answered, not much. But if he didn't...

I dialed, suddenly desperate to talk to him, hear his voice. All at once it seemed as if my entire world hinged on just that. The phone rang three times, and I was about to hang up, discouraged and beaten, when his voice came through, almost lost in a sea of background noise, music, voices, laughter. "Jo?" he said in a husky tone.

"Pacey, where are you?" I asked, unconsciously raising my voice to compete with the thunder of echoes coming through the phone. He didn't answer for a few moments. "Pacey?" I tried again.

"Listen, Jo, don't wait up for me, okay?" he said, almost shouting but still practically drowned out by noise.

"Wait, Pace," I said. "Tell me where you are."

"You don't need to come down here. I'm fine."

"Well I'm not."

"What? What's wrong?" His tone changed ever so slightly, and I detected traces of concern there. Pacey, forever my protector. If only he was able to protect me from myself. My greatest enemy.

"I want to talk to you, Pace. So either you come home or I'll come to you. I need to see you, okay?"

"Are you all right, Jo?" he asked, as if he hadn't heard me.

"Yes—no! Come home, sweetie, please."

There was a long pause. "Not yet," he said. "Go to bed; get some sleep. Don't worry about me."

"Pacey...?"

The line went dead.

"Dammit!" I threw the receiver at the couch, where it bounced and went skittering across the bare floor of the living room. The desperation was stronger now, the need to see Pacey's face and to touch him and beg him to—no, _force_ him to—forgive me was all-encompassing, overwhelming. I stood there for a few moments in panicked indecision, racking my brain for a way to fix this, to dig myself out of the gaping hole my transgressions had unearthed. The hole was going to swallow me alive if I didn't do something to reverse the damage.

Next thing I knew, I'd retrieved the phone, dialed another number and was tapping my fingernails against the countertop impatiently as I waited for a response. When he answered I didn't even bother with the pleasantries.

"Jack, I need you to do something for me," I said.

"Joey. Are you okay? What's up?"

"I need you to call Pacey and find out where he is for me."

"Sure thing," he said without missing a beat. "But you're scaring me, Jo."

I laughed a little, but there was no humor in it. "I'm scaring myself," I told him.

"Tell me it's not life or death, and I won't ask anymore questions."

"It's not life or death," I said. But it felt like a lie.


	7. Chapter 7

If it were in me to cheat on Joey, I think the blonde seated next to me at the bar would do just fine. She was obviously interested. Body language. She leaned in and smiled and licked her lips a lot; her cleavage seemed almost ready to burst through the front of her tight black sweater. Nice. Not Joey, but that was a good thing. Right now all somber brunettes within hailing distance were off-limits; the last thing I needed was a reminder of what awaited me back at home. I had just managed, with my last Scotch and soda (heavy on the Scotch, light on the soda) to drink the night away into that fuzzy dreamlike quality that worked like a salve to soothe the pain and the anger and the feeling of betrayal that she had promised me I'd never have to deal with again.

The blonde's hand was on my knee. Now, when did that happen? I looked at it in a vaguely puzzled way, as if some mildly interesting but unfamiliar creature had just crawled into my lap for a rest. She licked her lips again, a quick, sensuously self-conscious flick of the tongue, which was tinged a dark pink with the Cosmopolitans I'd been buying her. There was a time in my life when I would have taken her home and given her what she so obviously wanted without a second thought of consequences or propriety. Huh. That was the Pre-Joey Era. Or, rather, the Meso-Joey Era, if you want to get technical. Back then, things were simple and desires could be quenched through a meaningless, guilt-free fling with a pretty (if easy) girl, and it was possible to speak the truth without worrying ceaselessly what implications that truth might have on the rest of my life.

Not so anymore. Now everything, every tediously trivial slip of the tongue or bad choice of words or overlooked "I love you" or kiss that didn't last quite long enough had a terrible, unshakable weight attached to it. And these missteps were pulling us under, drowning us with their meaning or possible meaning or lack of meaning that we managed, always, to misconstrue. The blonde sitting next to me didn't look like a fight waiting to happen. She looked like the Anti-Joey, with her light hair and her slightly irritating but refreshingly inane small talk, with her straining black sweater and her forthright sexuality. Small flicks of the tongue over red-painted lips, not even trying to conceal what she wanted from me.

I was so weary of complexity. Suddenly simplicity seemed the answer to my prayers. I leaned toward her, placing my hand on top of the one she was resting on my knee.

"What did you say your name was?" I half-shouted over the music and chaotic bar babble.

"Cindy," she replied, with a slow swipe at her lower lip with that pink tongue.

Cindy—what else would it be? "I'm Pacey."

"I know," she said, and giggled with a sound like breaking glass. "You told me that already."

"Do you want to dance, Cindy?"

She plucked the cherry out of the bottom of her empty martini glass and put it into her mouth, slowly and deliberately, her wide, blue, heavily made-up eyes never leaving mine. I felt something stir deep inside of me, some sane, rational, buzz-killing part of my psyche that warned me to stop this now, now, before I stepped over the line. Before I lost sight of it.

When I took the hand Cindy offered with its fire-red, lacquered nails and led her toward the small, smoke-hazy dance floor, the stirring of Logical Pacey was stilled. I was a little surprised at how easily he went down. I put my arms around the blonde's waist and we began to move together to the thumping backbeat of the music. When I caught sight of a dark-haired woman dancing just a few feet away, I closed my eyes and slipped into the fuzzy terrain of my Scotch-sluggish mind. She couldn't hold a candle to Joey, but still, I couldn't look at her.

I walked out of the bar to take her phone call. I just left Cindy standing there on the dance floor, staring questioningly after me as I stepped outside into the frigid night air. It was still too loud. I pressed a hand to my free ear so I could hear her better. The sound of her voice, so clear and familiar and beautiful, so concerned, cut me to the core. I tried to make my own voice sound normal as I told her not to wait up for me. She seemed to understand something I wasn't saying, though. I could detect an edge that might have been near-panic in her plea for me to tell her where I was.

"You don't need to come down here," I told her. "I'm fine."

"Well I'm not," she said.

"What? What's wrong?" It was her tone that got to me, that note of desperation that I'd so rarely heard from her. It scared me.

"I want to talk to you, Pace. So either you come home or I'll come to you. I need to see you, okay?"

"Are you all right, Jo?" I asked, thinking that she sure didn't sound like she was.

"Yes—no! Come home, sweetie, please?"

Sweetie. There was a word she hardly ever used. Last time she'd used that particular term of endearment had been in the days following that terrible night of my attempted (and almost laughably unsuccessful) proposal. It struck a nerve now, as it had then. It wasn't Joey, that word. It meant something wrong and hurtful coming from her lips, it meant memories that I couldn't for the life of me erase no matter how hard I fought them. I swallowed and heard a dry click in my throat. "Not yet," I said into the phone, mechanically. "Go to bed; get some sleep. Don't worry about me." I snapped my cell closed against her protest and shoved it back into my pocket. My heart was beating hard, as if I'd just run a mile. A hand came out of nowhere and touched my arm, and I was so tightly wound that I jumped. "Shit!" I said, spinning around to see Cindy standing there. Cindy with her red lips and bleach-blonde hair and ample cleavage.

"Sorry," she said, giggling uncomplicatedly. "You disappeared on me."

I forced a smile that felt plastic and weird. "Well, you found me," I said in a tone that anyone who knew me would comprehend as phony. "Are you about ready for another Cosmo?"

I put my arm around her shoulders and guided her back inside the bar, where I bought her another drink and gulped down my own. Hearing Joey's voice had left a burning sore spot in my stomach, and dumping alcohol on top of that was like chugging down liquid fire. I winced, wondering if I was getting an ulcer. It would just figure, wouldn't it? Cindy was leaning close, cupping her hands to her mouth and pressing close to my ear to say something, and then the phone buzzed again in my pocket.

Sighing, but unwilling or unable to ignore it, I pulled it out and didn't even look at the caller ID window before answering.

"Joey, I told you, I'll be home when I'm home!" I said roughly.

"Whoa—well, I'm glad it was me instead of her, man!" came a familiar voice.

I took a deep breath and released it in a relieved laugh, wandering away from Cindy again and pushing my way through the crush of people back outside to my spot on the sidewalk. "Jack, my man, how are you?" I asked jubilantly, sounding drunk even to my own ears. "How goes it with my favorite same-sex couple?"

"Things are good, Pace," he said, and I could tell he was about to start asking questions. Like, for instance, why the hell would I answer the phone like that, and what was wrong at home? Questions I couldn't bear to answer. So I began to talk over him.

"I'm glad to hear that, you know, because that brother of mine, he can be a real ass when he wants to be, and you're a good man, McPhee, so you need to stick up for yourself if he starts in with his crap. It's not hard; I've been doing it my whole life. He's a pushover really, when you learn how to play him. How's that baby girl doing?"

"Pace—"

"I need to come home and see her before she grows up, that one," I rambled on. "She's growing so fast, and God, is she Jen all over again or what? I couldn't believe it last time I saw her. She's hardly even a baby anymore."

"No, she's a toddler. Pacey, stop for a second."

I did. I didn't know what else to do.

"Are you okay?" he asked.

I glanced over my shoulder where Cindy was waiting just inside the neon-edged door of the bar, now looking slightly agitated, her arms crossed over her black-wool-covered breasts. "Truth?" I asked.

"Always the truth, buddy."

"Not really."

"I figured. Want to talk about it?"

I paused. "Did she call you, Jackers?"

"She's worried sick, Pace. And from what I've heard already, I can't say that I blame her."

"I'm okay." I leaned against the brick wall, suddenly dizzy. "I'm okay," I repeated, as if to convince myself.

"Why don't you go home and set her mind at ease?"

"It's not that easy, Jackers. I wish it was, but it's not." My voice was choked, rising reluctantly up through my constricted throat.

"You love her. She loves you. That's pretty much all that matters," he said.

And suddenly I felt horribly, dangerously close to tears. "Shit, man!" I said forcefully, slamming my head against the brick wall so hard that stars sparkled in front of my eyes. "I wish that was true."


	8. Chapter 8

"Come on, Jack, come _on,_" I whispered to the phone that was tightly clutched in my sweaty hand. The minutes were dragging painfully by, the long hand on the clock across the room making laughably slow progress around its mocking round face. It had been damn near half an hour since I had shamelessly ensnared our old friend in the ugly tangled mess of our problems, and he hadn't called me back yet to let me know if he had been successful. My knee bounced up and down of its own accord, and I realized in a vague, careless way that I was wound so tightly I was likely to scream when the phone did ring.

I was wrong about that, though. I gasped, but I didn't scream. And I had pressed the button to answer almost before the first sharp ring had even begun to slice through the tomblike quiet of the loft. "Jack," I said, not liking the frantic note that tinged my voice but helpless to change it. "What did he say?"

"It's me, Jo."

My heart thumped once, hard, against my ribcage. "Pacey?"

He laughed shortly. "Good guess. I should probably be grateful you didn't say Matt."

_Ouch._ "Pace, please don't."

"I'm sorry."

The background noise was still there, but fainter, as if he had stepped out of the thick of the action to make this call.

"So Jackers called me. But I guess you knew he was going to."

"Yes," I said. "I asked him to."

He chuckled softly. "Have we slipped that far, Jo? We can't keep our problems between us anymore, now we have to drag our friends into our shit?"

"I didn't mean anything by it, Pacey, I— It was obvious you weren't going to give me the time of day; I thought maybe you'd listen to him."

"I'm not a child, Joey. I don't have a curfew."

I closed my eyes, wounded by the bitterness in his voice, wishing he was standing in front of me right now so that I could wrap my arms around him and make him remember why it was so damn important that we get through this rough patch.

And then in the gulf of silence that separated me in the apartment from him in the cold night just outside some smoky hole in the wall, I heard something that chilled my blood. It was faint, but it was also unmistakable. And it scared me more than any of the horrible what-ifs that had flooded my mind since the moment he walked out the door.

"_Pacey, are you coming back in? You said a few minutes. I've been waiting forever."_

A woman's voice. I felt my grip on the phone tighten convulsively as a surge of questions and unthinkable possibilities crowded me at once, fighting each other for dominance. He mumbled something unintelligible to this faceless woman who had dared approach him with me helpless on the other end of the line. And when he spoke to me again, I heard something in his voice that was, oddly, both comforting and alarming. When he spoke again, he sounded much more like himself, like the Pacey that I knew and loved. That comforted me. But he also sounded apologetic, hesitant, as if he were hoping against hope that somehow I hadn't overheard.

"Jo?" he said. "You still there?"

My mouth felt dry. I swallowed hard. "Who … who was that, Pace?"

"No one," he said quickly. Too quickly.

"Pacey?"

He sighed deeply into the phone. "It's nothing, Joey. Do you hear me? It's nothing."

"God, Pacey, please tell me you're … you're not out looking for a way to punish me. You—you wouldn't do that, would you?" I hated my tone, so weak, so supplicating. But I was helpless to alter it, to make it sound more like mine. He was silent for so long that I almost took it as an affirmative answer to my question. My palms were still sweaty, but now it was a cold sweat.

"You know me," he said, his words firm and heavy with meaning. "You _know_ me, Joey."

I nodded before I realized that he couldn't see it. "Yes," I managed to say. "But what I don't know and what I don't like is your frame of mind right now. Will you come home, please? We don't even have to talk tonight if you don't want to. But I'm not going to be okay until you're back here with me."

"_Pacey, come on, hon! It's not nice to keep a girl waiting." _ That voice. It made me shudder violently.

"Goddamn it! I'm on the phone, will you give me a minute?!" Pacey exploded without warning at the faintly echoing voice, and I closed my eyes again, wincing against the forcefulness of his words, realizing just how incredibly out of touch with himself he was tonight. Had I done this to him? Had I really pushed him this far? If so, I would end up hating myself for it. That was one thing I could be sure of.

I reached up with a shaking hand to brush a tear off my cheek impatiently.

"Joey?" he said, the angry tone he had just used on the girl at the bar reverting easily to his real voice, the one I'd known all my life.

"What, Pace?" I asked, resisting the urge to ask him, like a woman scorned, if he was going to hang up on me so he could get back to his new girlfriend, knowing that the bad judgment of a statement like that could push him over the edge he was currently hovering on.

"I'll be home in twenty minutes," he said. "Wait up for me?"

"Of course," I said, breathing a sigh of relief. "You know I will."

It was more like fifteen minutes. When he swept through the door, bringing ghostly tendrils of the chilly night in with him, we stood facing each other for a strange period of moments. I suddenly didn't know what to say. His cheeks and nose were red from the cold, and his eyes were bloodshot, and he was looking at me with an odd mix of emotions that I couldn't begin to interpret.

I was about to say something, anything, just to break the eerie, loaded silence that had settled over us, when he reached for my arm and pulled me roughly into an embrace. Pressing my face into his coat, breathing in a pleasant mix of winter air, secondhand smoke, and Pacey himself, an almost painful wave of relief washed over me.

"I love you," I said, my voice muffled in the folds of his coat. "I love you so much, Pace." He raised his hands to my hair and stroked it firmly but gently. There was an aura of strength about him then, invisible waves of some emotion I couldn't begin to name or analyze drifting out of his body and enveloping mine as he held me. It occurred to me that he seemed like a man who has just escaped some horrible fate and has been returned to the life he'd almost lost.

"I'm not going to let it happen," he said so unexpectedly that I took a step back from him and looked up into his fever-bright eyes.

"What?" I asked, perplexed.

He gripped my upper arms and held me at arms' length, holding my gaze with an intensity that frightened me. "This! This dissolution, or whatever the hell it is," he said. "We're tearing each other apart, Joey, and I want us to stop before we finish the job. I want us to stop while we still can, while there's still something left between us to salvage. If this keeps up we're going to lose each other, do you understand that? I don't want to lose you. That's just about all I know for sure anymore."

I looked back at him, at the fire in his red-rimmed eyes, at the determination written all over his face, and was overcome with a wave of love for this man, this man who was once the boy I had given myself to, mind, body, and yes, even soul—despite the widespread misconception that my soul belonged to another. My soul was Pacey's—it always had been.

"Pace," I whispered. "I don't want to lose you either. I'm just so—"

"I'm not done," he interrupted. "Tonight I could have made the biggest mistake of my life, and knowing my track record, that's saying a hell of a lot. I could have fucked up royally this time."

"That girl I heard…"

He shook his head impatiently. "That doesn't matter, Jo. It was nothing. I told you that. But I'm not sorry I met her, because it was the kind of wake-up call I needed. You see, I could have stepped over the line, but I didn't. I _didn't._ And now I know that I never could, and I never will. Do you believe that?"

I nodded, unable to speak over the lump that had risen in my throat.

"Look, Jo, I know you're scared, okay? God, I probably know that better than anyone. But that excuse just doesn't cut it with me anymore, and I'm telling you that now because I want it to be clear from the beginning. That fear you have, it's single-handedly trying to destroy us, and as much as I wish I could fight that battle for you, Jo, I can't. It's yours. So you have to tell me right now if you're willing to face your demons and work through this with me. If you're not—" He broke off, a pained expression clouding his earnest eyes. His voice lowered as he went on. "If you're not, I need to know that, too."

Tears had flooded my eyes, but they didn't fall. I looked at him through a watery film, wishing he could read my heart like a book so I wouldn't have to try to put everything I was feeling into words. That would be impossible. I think he understood enough, as it was. His eyes told me that he knew more than I could say.

"I want to," I said in a hoarse whisper. And I tried to go on but found that I didn't know how. Pacey moved his hands up to my shoulders and held my gaze mercilessly.

"_Can_ you?" he asked. "That's what I need to know."

I thought of the look on his face the night he'd come to my office with roses and a ring, the dawning realization in his eyes that Joey Potter might not be the pedestal-worthy goddess he had effectively turned her into over years that made up our past. I thought of my panic, my devastation over what I thought I was bound to lose. The blossoming hatred of myself, of the man whose hand was on my thigh, and even, shamefully, of Pacey—for being the perfect man when there shouldn't be such a thing, for loving me so much it ignited all my terrors of commitment and forever, for not disappointing me as I had fully expected him to do, somehow, at some point. What does that say about me and my issues? I could keep an army of therapists in business, certainly.

Now I looked into those eyes and saw only the man I had always loved, and he was offering me a chance that by rights, I should never have been given. And I loved him so much more for that alone.

I realized I had not answered him and that a long silence had spun out, his eyes searching my face, hopefully, tentatively, carefully. A small smile tugged at the corners of my mouth as I spoke. "Yes," I said quietly. "God, yes. I can do that."

He heaved a heavy sigh and pulled me back into another suffocating embrace, and we clung to each other in the darkness of our loft apartment. When at last we were able to let go of the haunting echoes of what we had almost thrown away, we pulled apart.

"I love you, Potter," he said gruffly, teasingly. "Want to go to bed with me?"

I smiled, the first real smile I'd managed in what seemed like an eternity. It felt wonderful. Returning my smile with a twinkle in his eyes, he reached up with strong, gentle hands and began to undress me.


End file.
